Bad Deal

On Tuesday, the Trudeau government announced a $372.5 million ‘repayable loan’ to Bombardier, who had been asking for $1.3 billion in support for it’s C-Series aircraft since November 2015. While Bombardier executives are all smiles at this announcement, here are 10 reasons why this bailout is bad news for Canadians:

1. They don’t even need the money

Last year, a top C-Series executive publicly stated Bombardier had “secured all the funding required to ramp up” the C-Series program and that federal cash would be “really just an extra bonus that would be helpful but is very clearly not required.” Translation: we’ll take free money, but we don’t actually need it!

Bombardier’s CEO Alain Bellemare earned a compensation package worth $6.4 million in 2015. Normally, how much private companies pay their executives is their own business – after all, it’s the company’s money, not taxpayers’. But in Bombardier’s case, taxpayers are subsidizing generous executive salaries.